Abstract not found

This paper presents a new approach to the recognition of sentence structure by computer in human languages that have variable word order. In a sense, the algorithm is not new; there is good evidence that it was known 700 years ago (Covington 1984). But it has not been implemented on computers, and the modern implementations that are most like it fail to realize its crucial advantage for dealing with variable word order. 1 In fact, present-day parsing technology is so tied to the fixed word order of English that researchers in Germany and Japan customarily build parsers for English rather than their own languages. The new

this dissertation. I single out for special thanks first a few of the Ventura Hall crowd, including Mfirvet Eng, Nancy Wiegand, Susan Stucky (the other Mennonite formal linguist), and Kathie Carpenter, Suzanne Kemmer and Michael Barlow, with whom I have happily shared every step of the Stanford graduate pilgrimage. Next, I warmly thank Gina Wein for her competent administrative support and for her friendship. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the strong shaping influences of the members of the Stanford linguistics faculty, who teach and also model a vibrant and professional approach to linguistic research. Representative of these scholars are the three members of my reading committee, whose work and counsel have had a profound effect on my work; I thank Joan Bresnan, Ivan Sag, and my principal advisor, Thomas Wasow, whose patience, cheerful persistence, unstinting support, solid critique, creative ideas, and common sense made the writing of this thesis possible and enjoyable. Every student should have such an advisor

this paper, we will study the possibilities for applying lexical rules to the analysis of English syntax, and in particular the structure of the verb phrase. We will develop a lexicon whose empirical coverage extends to the full range of verb subcategories, complex adverbial phrases, auxiliaries, the passive construction, yes/no questions and the particularly troublesome case of predicatives. The effect of a lexical rule, in our system, will be to produce new lexical entries from old lexical entries. The similarity between our system and the metarule system of generalized phrase-structure grammar (GPSG, as presented in Gazdar, et al. 1985) is not coincidental. Our lexical rules serve much the same purpose as metarules in GPSG, which were restricted to lexical phrase structure rules. The similarity is in a large part due to the fact that with the universal phrase-structure schemes being fixed, the role of a lexical category assignment in effect determines phrase-structure in much the same way as a lexical category entry and lexical phrase-structure rule determines lexical phrase-structure in GPSG. Our lexical rules will also bear a relationship to the lexical rules found in lexical-functional grammar (LFG, see Bresnan 1982), as LFG rules are driven by the grammatical role assigned to arguments. Many of our analyses were first applied to either LFG or GPSG, as these were the first serious linguistic theories based on a notion of unification. In the process of explaining the basic principles behind categorial grammar and developing our lexical rule system, we will establish a categorial grammar lexicon with coverage of English syntactic constructions comparable to that achieved within published accounts of the GPSG or LFG frameworks. Language, at its most abstract level, i...

In this paper, we argue that the grammatical scopings of quantifiers should be treated by deductive methods. In support of this position, we offer a logical treatment of almost all previously proposed substantive constraints on quantifier scoping, including those imposed by coordinate structure, control verbs, unbounded dependency constructions, anaphoric dependency and nested dependent quantifiers. These are correctly captured by a handful of linguistically motivated and logically natural inference schemes for quantification, coordination and unbounded dependency, combined with the previously motivated function introduction and elimination schemes of categorial logic. In addition, we argue that phrase-structure and transformational accounts of similar phenomena at best provide an approximation of the logical approach.

This paper describes a new formalization of Lexical-Functional Grammar called R-LFG (where the "R" stands for "Resource-based"). The formal details of R-LFG are presented in Johnson (1997); the present work concentrates on motivating R-LFG and explaining to linguists how it differs from the "classical" LFG framework presented in Kaplan and Bresnan (1982). This work is largely a reaction to the linear logic semantics for LFG developed by Dalrymple and colleagues (Dalrymple et al., 1995; Dalrymple et al., 1996a; Dalrymple et al., 1996b; Dalrymple et al., 1996c). As they note, LFG's f-structure completeness and coherence constraints fall out as a by-product of the linear logic machinery they propose for semantic interpretation, thus making those f-structure mechanisms redundant. Given that linear logic machinery or something like it is independently needed for semantic interpretation, it seems reasonable to explore the extent to which it is capable of handling feature structure constraints as well. R-LFG represents the extreme position that all linguistically required feature structure dependencies can be captured by the resource-accounting machinery of a linear or similiar logic independently needed for semantic interpretation. The goal is to show that LFG linguistic analyses can be expressed as clearly and perspicuously using the smaller set of mechanisms of R-LFG as they can using the much larger set of mechanisms in LFG: if this is the case then we will have shown that positing these extra f-structure mechanisms are not linguistically warranted. One way to show this would be to present a translation procedure which reduces LFGs to equivalent R-LFGs, but currently no such procedure is known. Thus we proceed on a case by case basis, demonstrating that particular LFG anal...

In this article, we point out some problems in the theory of A-movement and control within Principles and Parameters models, and specifically within the minimalist approach of Chomsky (1995). In order to overcome these problems, we motivate a departure from the standard transformational theory of A-movement. In particular, we argue that DPs are merged in the position where they surface, and from there they attract a predicate. On this basis, control can simply be construed as the special case in which the same DP attracts more than one predicate. Arbitrary control reduces to the attraction of a predicate by an operator in C. We show that the basic properties of control follow from an appropriate Scopal version of Chomsky's (1995) Last Resort and MLC and from Kayne's (1984) Connectedness, phrased as conditions on the attraction operation, or technically ATTRACT. Our approach has considerable advantages in standard cases of A-movement as well, deriving the distribution of reconstruction effects at LF and of blocking effects on phonosyntactic rules at PF.

Intensionality phenomena are known to show a strong correlation with syntax. In simple transitive constructions intensionality effects are standardly absent. Substitution of co-referring object NPs preserves truth (1a,b) 1; furthermore, the presence of a nonreferring or nondenoting object yields a false sentence (1c): (1) a. Max met [ DP Boris Karloff]. b. Max met [ DP Bill Pratt]. c. Max met [ DP a unicorn]. By contrast, intensionality manifests itself with all clausal complement constructions. Substitution of coreferring terms in the complement needn’t preserve truth (2a,b); and the presence of a nonreferring or nondenoting term needn’t induce falsity (2c): 2 (2) a. Max imagined [ CP that [ DP Boris Karloff] was approaching]] b. Max imagined [ CP that [ DP Bill Pratt] was approaching]] c. Max imagined [ CP that [ DP a unicorn] was approaching]] Although pervasive, the correlation between syntax and semantics found in (1)- (2) seems to be violated by a small class of verbs showing the surface grammar of transitives but the semantic behavior of

This thesis proposes new analyses of English missing object constructions (mocs) (e.g. the tough construction, purpose infinitives, etc.) and parasitic gap formation. These analyses are formulated in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (hpsg). hpsg divides unbounded dependency constructions (udcs) into two classes depending on whether the filler is in argument or non-argument position. mocs have argument fillers and are classified as weak udcs. The evidence that motivates the weak udc analysis is re-evaluated and it is claimed that, in fact, mocs are not udcs. It is proposed that a lexical rule promotes missing objects from the comps to the subj list in much the same way as passive promotes objects. In contrast to passive, the original subject is not demoted and missing object vps have two elements in subj, both available to be controlled. Raising and Equi signs are modified to permit them to inherit second subj members from their complements: in this way the appare...

In this paper, I analyze aspects of wh-question formation in typologically different languages. I discuss languages such as German, where wh-movement (of a single wh-phrase) to a scopal Spec CP position applies overtly (i.e., the full whmovement construction), and languages like Duala and Kikuyu, in which a whelement